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Many of you said I should first take a official GMAT practice exam on mba website and so I did...my score came out to be 500(IR2/Q39/V20), that is without any preparation. I had 0 prior knowledge about the type of questions that come in the exam. I know 500 is pretty bad score even without studying.

For me IR was the most difficult and confusing of all the. According to me in Verbal, what I got most wrong were the reading comprehensions as they take up a lot of time. Now i'd like some advice on how can I get my score to 700+,my aim is go give GMAT by January end. Is GMAT official guide and Manhattan books enough to pump up my score or should I buy E gmat paid course as well? I've heard that the verbal section that E Gmat offers is really good for non-natives.

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22 Oct 2018, 14:03

Hi Peekay25000,

In a prior post, you noted that you were not planning to apply to School until 2020, so you have plenty of time to study and improve. A 500 is not bad for an initial CAT Score (the average Score on the Official GMAT hovers around 550 most years - and this CAT Score isn't too far below that). Raising a 500 to a 700+ will likely require at least another 3 months of consistent, guided study - and you'll have to make significant improvements to how you handle BOTH the Quant and Verbal sections. Thankfully, the GMAT is a consistent, predictable Exam, so you CAN train to score at a higher level.

Based on the timeframe that you have described, you will need to be really 'efficient' with your studies going forward, so you would likely find it beneficial to invest in a GMAT Course of some type (either Guided Self-Study or instructor-led). When it comes to studying for the GMAT, there are a variety of different options. Most GMAT Companies offer some type of free materials (practice problems, Trial Accounts, videos, etc.) that you can use to 'test out' a product before you buy it. We have a variety of those resources at our website (www.empowergmat.com). I suggest that you take advantage of all of them then choose the one that best matches your personality, timeline and budget.

If you have any additional questions, then you can feel free to contact me directly.

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22 Oct 2018, 22:32

Hi Peekay25000,

As for IR, don’t worry about it too much for now because it’s not going to be counted toward your 800 scale GMAT score. IR is a useful tool for school to gauge your conceptual and problem-solving skill level. You know, after all, you are going to read A LOT of cases for in-depth analyses as part of your MBA program. IR will inform the schools how well you will perform on these case analyses. So until you hit like 640, just focus on your multiple-choice questions!!! This score matters more on your application.

As for improving your quant score, we would like to share with you our principle of "Slow, Hand, and Detail"! This method helped many of our students.

1. Solve questions "slowly" when you study and practice.

2. Solve the problems by "hand" as a rule. Understanding how the problems are solved in videos is very different from actually solving them yourself. So, practice by solving the problems by hand-writing them is very important.

3. When you solve them, write a "detailed" calculation process without skipping any steps. So when you are practicing, try to understand the entire process of calculation very thoroughly for each question. This is very very important!!! Students often make mistakes by skipping a step or two in the solving process.

We offer both free trial pack and free video lessons to students on our site mathrevolution.com. So check it out to see if our material will work for you. Also don’t forget to try our free diagnostic test!!

Many of you said I should first take a official GMAT practice exam on mba website and so I did...my score came out to be 500(IR2/Q39/V20), that is without any preparation. I had 0 prior knowledge about the type of questions that come in the exam. I know 500 is pretty bad score even without studying.

For me IR was the most difficult and confusing of all the. According to me in Verbal, what I got most wrong were the reading comprehensions as they take up a lot of time. Now i'd like some advice on how can I get my score to 700+,my aim is go give GMAT by January end. Is GMAT official guide and Manhattan books enough to pump up my score or should I buy E gmat paid course as well? I've heard that the verbal section that E Gmat offers is really good for non-natives.

Thank you!

Hi Peekay25000,

Glad to see that you took the Mock test. You now know your weakness and can work on them. You can go with either courses as both are very well designed. However for Verbal I would lean a little more towards E-gmat. It is a very well designed course especially for non-natives. Plus as I mentioned in my previous post, e-gmatScholaranium which is included in the verbal online course is one of the best verbal practice tools in the market. You can easily track your progress in that you can identify your strengths and analyze and improve on your weak areas. For Quant you can go with MGMAT or E-gmat Quant. You cannot go wrong with either of them.

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23 Oct 2018, 18:39

Peekay25000 wrote:

Now i'd like some advice on how can I get my score to 700+,my aim is go give GMAT by January end. Is GMAT official guide and Manhattan books enough to pump up my score or should I buy E gmat paid course as well? I've heard that the verbal section that E Gmat offers is really good for non-natives.

These are questions that cannot be answered, except with a "maybe". Just get started. It's not as if you can't add a course or some new material to your plan after a few days or weeks. Just don't equate any "material" or a "course" to a "score".
_________________

Many of you said I should first take a official GMAT practice exam on mba website and so I did...my score came out to be 500(IR2/Q39/V20), that is without any preparation. I had 0 prior knowledge about the type of questions that come in the exam. I know 500 is pretty bad score even without studying.

For me IR was the most difficult and confusing of all the. According to me in Verbal, what I got most wrong were the reading comprehensions as they take up a lot of time. Now i'd like some advice on how can I get my score to 700+,my aim is go give GMAT by January end. Is GMAT official guide and Manhattan books enough to pump up my score or should I buy E gmat paid course as well? I've heard that the verbal section that E Gmat offers is really good for non-natives.

You can start with Quant or Verbal which suits you. If you have started with Quant then Start with the Arithmetic but if started with verbal then start first with Sentence correction. One month for learning Quant concepts and one month for practicing question and same practice for Verbal. During you Practicing question don't forget to make an error log to track your weak areas after practice. Once you know your weak areas revise your Concepts related to those areas and do some more Practice. 6-8 CATs are enough for practice the real tests. Make your Stamina for sitting 3 hours in the test and don't study more than 2 hours in one sit and 4 hours per day

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25 Oct 2018, 16:50

Hi Peekay25000,

So, the good news is that you’ve completed the first step: taking a diagnostic. Also, believe it or not, 500 is not a terrible score, given that you took the test with absolutely no prep. That being said, increasing your score by 200+ points in about 2 months will be quite difficult. Since you are not applying until 2020, you should probably give yourself more time to prep for your GMAT.

As for how to improve to a 700+ GMAT score, you need to start with the foundations of GMAT quant and verbal and work your way to more advanced topics. Furthermore, your study plan must allow you to fully learn each individual GMAT quant and verbal topic one at a time, so you can methodically improve your knowledge and build your skills. For example, let’s say you are learning about Number Properties. First, you should develop as much conceptual knowledge about Number Properties as possible. In other words, your goal will be to completely understand properties of factorials, perfect squares, quadratic patterns, LCM, GCF, units digit patterns, divisibility, and remainders, to name a few concepts. After carefully reviewing the conceptual underpinnings of how to answer Number Properties questions, practice by answering 50 or more questions just from Number Properties. When you do dozens of questions of the same type one after the other, you learn just what it takes to get questions of that type correct consistently. If you aren't getting close to 90 percent of questions of a certain type correct, go back and seek to better understand how that type of question works, and then do more questions of that type until you get to around at least 90 percent accuracy in your training. If you get 100 percent of some sets correct, even better. Number Properties is just one example; follow this process for all quant topics.

When you are working on learning to answer questions of a particular type, start off taking your time, and then seek to speed up as you get more comfortable answering questions of that type. As you do such practice, do a thorough analysis of each question that you don't get right. If you got a remainder question wrong, ask yourself why. Did you make a careless mistake? Did you not properly apply the remainder formula? Was there a concept you did not understand in the question? By carefully analyzing your mistakes, you will be able to efficiently fix your weaknesses and in turn improve your GMAT quant skills.

Each time you strengthen your understanding of a topic and your skill in answering questions of a particular type, you increase your odds of hitting your score goal. You know that there are types of questions that you are happy to see and types that you would rather not see, and types of questions that you take a long time to answer correctly. Learn to more effectively answer the types of questions that you would rather not see, and make them into your favorite types. Learn to correctly answer in two minutes or less questions that you currently take five minutes to answer. By finding, say, a dozen weaker quant areas and turning them into strong areas, you will make great progress toward hitting your quant score goal. If a dozen areas turn out not to be enough, strengthen some more areas.

You can work on verbal in a similar manner. For example, let’s say you start by learning about Critical Reasoning. Your first goal is to fully master the individual Critical Reasoning topics: Strengthen the Argument, Weaken the Argument, Resolve the Paradox, etc. As you learn about each Critical Reasoning question type, do focused practice so that you can track your skill in answering each type. If, for example, you get a weakening question wrong, ask yourself why. Did you make a careless mistake? Did you not recognize the specific question type? Were you doing too much analysis in your head? Did you skip over a keyword in an answer choice? You must thoroughly analyze your mistakes and seek to turn weaknesses into strengths by focusing on the question types you dread seeing and the questions you take a long time to answer correctly.

When practicing Reading Comprehension, you need to develop a reading strategy that is both efficient and thorough. Reading too fast and not understanding what you have read are equally as harmful as reading too slow and using up too much time. When attacking Reading Comprehension passages, you must have one clear goal in mind: to understand the context of what you are reading. However, you must do so efficiently, so you need to avoid getting bogged down in the details of each paragraph and instead focus on understanding the main point of each paragraph. That being said, do not fall into the trap of thinking that you can just read the intro and the conclusion and thereby comprehend the main idea of a paragraph. As you read a paragraph, consider how the context of the paragraph relates to previous paragraphs, so you can continue developing your overall understanding of the passage. Furthermore, as you practice Reading Comprehension, focus on the exact types of questions with which you struggle: Find the Main Idea, Inference, Author’s Tone, etc. As with Critical Reasoning, analyze your incorrect Reading Comprehension answers to better determine why you tend to get a particular question type wrong, and then improve upon your weaknesses. You can perfect your reading strategy with a lot of practice, but keep in mind that GMAT Reading Comprehension passages are not meant to be easy to read. So, to better prepare yourself to tackle such passages, read magazines with similar content and style, such as the Economist, Scientific American, and Smithsonian.

Sentence Correction is a bit of a different animal compared to Reading Comprehension and Critical Reasoning. There are three aspects to getting correct answers to GMAT Sentence Correction questions: what you know, such as grammar rules, what you see, such as violations of grammar rules and the logic of sentence structure, and what you do, such as carefully considering each answer choice in the context of the non-underlined portion of the sentence. To drive up your Sentence Correction score, it is likely that you will have to work on all three of those aspects.

Regarding what you know, first and foremost, you MUST know your grammar rules. Let's be clear, though: GMAT Sentence Correction is not really a test of knowledge of grammar rules. The reason for learning the grammar rules is so that you can determine what sentences convey and whether sentences are well-constructed. In fact, in many cases, incorrect answers to Sentence Correction questions are grammatically flawless. Thus, often your task is to use your knowledge of grammar rules to determine which answer choice creates the most logical sentence meaning and structure.

This determination of whether sentences are well-constructed and logical is the second aspect of finding correct answers to Sentence Correction questions, what you see. You have to put work into developing your skill in seeing what is going on in the various versions of the sentence that the answer choices create. To develop this skill, you probably have to slow way down. You won't develop this skill by spending under two minutes per question. For a while, anyway, you have to spend time with each question, maybe even ten or fifteen minutes on one question sometimes, analyzing every answer choice until you see the details that you have to see in order to choose the correct answer. As you go through the answer choices, consider the meaning conveyed by each version of the sentence. Does the meaning make sense? Even if you can tell what the version is SUPPOSED to convey, does the version really convey that meaning? Is there a verb to go with the subject? Do all pronouns clearly refer to nouns? By slowing way down and looking for these details, you learn to see what you have to see in order to clearly understand which answer to a Sentence Correction question is correct.

There is only one correct answer to any Sentence Correction question, there are clear reasons why that choice is correct and the others are not, and those reasons are not that the correct version simply "sounds right." In fact, the correct version often sounds a little off at first. That correct answers may sound a little off is not surprising. If the correct answer were always the one that sounded right, then most people most of the time would get Sentence Correction questions correct, without really knowing why the wrong answers were wrong and the correct answers were correct. So, you have to go beyond choosing what "sounds right" and learn to clearly see the logical reasons why one choice is better than all of the others.

As for the third aspect of getting Sentence Correction questions correct, what you do, the main thing you have to do is be very careful. You have to make sure that you are truly considering the structures of sentences and the meanings conveyed rather than allowing yourself to be tricked into choosing trap answers that sound right but don't convey meanings that make sense. You also have to make sure that you put some real energy into finding the correct answers. Finding the correct answer to a Sentence Correction question may take bouncing from choice to choice repeatedly until you start to see the differences between the choices that make all choices wrong except for one. Often, when you first look at the choices, only one or two seem obviously incorrect. Getting the right answers takes a certain work ethic. You have to be determined to see the differences and to figure out the precise reasons that one choice is correct.

To improve what you do when you answer Sentence Correction questions, seek to become aware of how you are going about answering them. Are you being careful and looking for logic and details, or are you quickly eliminating choices that sound a little off, and then choosing the best of the rest? If you choose an incorrect answer, consider what you did that resulted in your arriving at that answer and what you could do differently in order to arrive at correct answers more consistently. Furthermore, see how many questions you can get correct in a row as you practice. If you break your streak by missing one, consider what you could have done differently to extend your streak.

As with your Critical Reasoning and Reading Comprehension regimens, after learning a particular Sentence Correction topic, engage in focused practice with 30 questions or more that involve that topic. As your Sentence Correction skills improve, you will then want to practice with questions that test you on skills from multiple Sentence Correction topics.

So, work on accuracy and generally finding correct answers, work on specific weaker areas one by one to make them strong areas, and when you take a practice GMAT or the real thing, take all the time per question available to do your absolute best to get right answers consistently. The GMAT is essentially a game of seeing how many right answers you can get in the time allotted. Approach the test with that conception in mind, and focus intently on the question in front of you with one goal in mind: getting a CORRECT answer.

In order to follow the path described above, you may need some new verbal and quant materials, so take a look at the GMAT Club reviews for the best quant and verbal courses.

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01 Nov 2018, 23:25

Hi,

I can share some mistakes I did during my initial phase of Gmat Preparation so you can benefit from it.

I did not follow a strategy and I overdosed on too many materials and I just confused myself in the process.I used Manhattan guides for Quant, PowerScore CR Bible for CR and much more and I thought that would suffice to get 700+ score.

I would suggest you to follow a simple approach.

For Quant, just use TTP's course.(They provide 5 day trial for just 1$) so you can see it suits you but I'm sure that to reach from Q39 to Q47/48/51, whatever your target is, this will be the best platform to go from basic to hard since they have the proper division of levels.I started using this course after trying a lot of materials and I'm able to work on my weak areas using this.

For Verbal.SC: Use e-gmat or use Manhattan SC and complement it with watching Ron's videos.CR: Mostly comes through practice.RC: Read Read Read.

You can PM me if you want me to share something in detail.I hope this helps and I hope you achieve your target.